You can have too much choice sometimes. Remember the days when "contrast", "brightness" and "volume" were the only adjustments available when messing with a telly's settings? My new set has all kinds of options to play with. If you've ever wanted to add "tint", or increase the level of cyan in your picture, I recommend you get this 37" Toshiba.
I've had my new HD TV for a week, and I'm still playing with it. I actually duplicated the calibration settings from a website review, but wasn't happy with them. Maybe the reviewer got a great picture with those settings, but he probably wasn't watching with a Virgin Media digibox. I seem to have it cracked now, but the bad thing about having a HD TV is that you realize how pixellated the least popular channels are. And even stations you'd think would be high-quality (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, etc.) can be a bit cruddy and fragmented.
I've reached a compromise on my settings now, though. Most of the channels look good, and the DVD picture is very good – making me realize how grey my old telly's blacks were. I decided to buy some component video leads and RCA audio cable to connect my DVD, but was gob-smacked to be told by Bearded Bloke at the Sony Centre that each will set me back £20. £40 to connect a DVD player?! You can buy a DVD player for less than that! Spectacled Bloke at Panasonic had the audio lead for £20 and the component for £15 (but not in stock). A quick browse online found both leads at half those prices, so I bought some there. Then found an even cheaper set on another website the next day. Sod's Law, huh?
I'm still annoyed I have no surround sound, as DVDs just aren't the same in stereo. But I did manage to get a bit of vitality into the aural experience, by setting my DVD player's sound output to "3D Sound" -- which really did help. Ensuring your DVD player is outputting PCM (not Bitstream) is also a good tip for non-surround sound viewers. But I can't wait to pay off this telly, so I can start thinking about a sub-£200 speaker system. I noticed a good Samsung one that can decode DD5.1/DTS and connects via HDMI. My brother picked up a second hand Panasonic speaker system (no HDMI connection, but it had an inbuilt PVR) for £115 on Ebay, so it's worth keeping an eye out there.
And yes, having a HD TV with nothing HD to watch is more annoying. A Playstation 3* will be on my Christmas list, I reckon. I also read about Freesat from BBC/ITV – a subscription-less satellite service with some HD channels. You just pay for the box (approx. £150) and installation (£80). It seems you get pretty much the same choice as Freeview, but the bonus of a few HD channels. No ITV-HD yet, though. And I doubt they'll ever get Sky onboard -- meaning zero chance of watching Lost, 24, Prison Break or Battlestar Galactica in high-def.
All things considered, I think it's best to leave Freesat and check its progress in a year's time. But I'm really glad BBC/ITV are making the effort to get free-to-air HD content available nationwide. There must be hundreds of thousands of HD TVs in the UK now -- broadcasting nothing but standard-def. That's like a colour TV receiving black-and-white transmissions.
And finally, one thing I'm very pleased about is my telly's PC Input. I've never had one before, so now any downloaded TV shows are getting the LCD 37" widescreen treatment. It's amazing how much better a downloaded episode looks on an LCD TV, as pixilation was far more noticeable on my 17" monitor – especially for shows not recorded from a HD source. It's just a pity my laptop's sound via my TV is (at the moment) worse than my PC speakers. I adjusted some bass and treble settings, so it's not too bad now. But still.
* But I'm annoyed the PS3 isn't multi-region, so my Region 1 DVDs can't be played through it. Are there multi-region Blu-Ray players available yet? If not, it looks like my DVD player will remain hooked up just to play US discs. They call that progress?
